The Appointments
Red Lobster named Andy Pitts its permanent Chief Marketing Officer and promoted Jon Tryzbiak to Chief Information Officer on October 7, completing two of the most consequential seats on a leadership bench the Orlando-based seafood chain has been rebuilding since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
Pitts had been serving as interim CMO since January 2026, a period during which he oversaw the launch of Red Lobster Nation, a redesigned loyalty program intended to give members greater flexibility in earning and redeeming rewards. He brings nearly two decades of restaurant marketing experience, with prior engagements across Wingstop, Smoothie King, Fogo de Chão and Dairy Queen — a roster that spans fast-casual, polished-casual and international dining concepts. His prior agency work on the Red Lobster account gives him an unusual advantage: brand fluency that typically takes an incoming CMO a full year to acquire.
Tech Transformation Mandate
Tryzbiak's elevation to CIO formalizes a mandate he has been executing since joining the company earlier in 2026: simplifying and prioritizing technology delivery across corporate and restaurant-level systems. His brief explicitly includes artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, areas that full-service dining operators have been slower to adopt than their fast-food counterparts. Tryzbiak previously held technology leadership roles at Brinker International, FB Society, Checkers & Rally's, Bloomin' Brands and Landry's — a cross-section of full-service and quick-service environments that mirrors the operational complexity Red Lobster must navigate.
Chief Executive Officer Damola Adamolekun framed the dual hire as an infrastructure investment rather than a marketing pivot. "With Andy and Jon in these leadership roles, we're better positioned to evolve the brand with greater focus, cohesion and discipline," he said.
Building Out the C-Suite
The two appointments are the latest in a deliberate series. Red Lobster also named Brad Hill Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Transformation, and Kristen Briede Chief Global Development Officer, earlier this year. The accumulation of five senior hires within roughly ten months points to a company that exited bankruptcy with an operating structure it considered significantly under-resourced at the executive level.
For the broader casual-dining sector, the moves carry a signal worth watching. Full-service chains have struggled to close the digital and loyalty gap with fast-casual peers, and operators that have invested in both CMO-level brand strategy and CIO-level data infrastructure simultaneously — rather than sequentially — have generally demonstrated faster recovery curves. Red Lobster's pairing of a loyalty relaunch with a technology modernization program follows a playbook that chains such as Dine Brands and Denny's have employed during their own restructuring cycles, as noted in prior casual-dining recovery coverage on this platform.
The seafood category itself remains under pressure from elevated protein costs and shifting consumer spending, dynamics that food-cost trend reporting has tracked closely throughout 2025 and into 2026. Red Lobster's ability to convert its loyalty and technology investments into measurable traffic and check-average gains will be the near-term test of whether the rebuilt executive team can deliver results as well as credentials.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.